For some time now, Barb and I have been using Wengo for video and chat calls. It turns out, the kids love it almost more than we do. THis is Zach (sitting at my desk), talking with Justin (who is in Pittsburgh, 600 miles away), and just hanging out together. They ended up spending 2-3 hours just playing around, showing off stuff they were doing – heck, they even ‘shared breakfast’.
Isn’t this the space-age video phone technology that we were always told would come? Now I want my flying car!
Forget the flying car: where is my death ray?
i’m tempted to say how exciting it is that we’ve progressed all the way to 1995 technology (cu-seeme); but of course there were video phones in 1985, they just weren’t cheap enough for enough people to have them that you’d have anybody to call if you got one. cu-seeme at least had the virtue of being cheap, if the downside of being susceptible to patent banditry.
but seriously, this does sound cool. thanks for telling us about it!
but of course there were video phones in 1985 and cu-seeme.
Really, this technology (Wengo) makes Cu-seeme seem like banging sticks together to get a message across. This is full motion video, full audio, at high resolution. It is dirt cheap (software on all ends is free, and opensource), the equipment to run it is very cheap (webcams are about $20 for a basic one, and it doesn’t require a high end PC to run).
Yes, in basic concept, it’s the same as cu-seeme, but basic technology is only a small fraction of the measure of the usefulness of a technology. VOIP technology is basically 30+ years old, but with the advent of cheap high bandwidth connections for the masses, plus faster and better computers, only now is it getting widespread adoption.
I’ve used my webcam similarly – hanging out with a friend all day while we did stuff – played a game together online, chatted, payed our own bills, etc. It’s nice to have the company, even that way.
Good for them!
Shayde,
Quick techie question…what mechanism are you using to publish entries here to LJ?
Most of the time I just use MT’s normal post mechanism. For pictures like that I use Flickr’s ‘blog this’ option on my uploaded pictures. It does a remote call right into the blog and formats and posts the image. The only thing it can’t do is let me set categories on my postings, which I need to go back and do after the post has happened.
Pretty neat 🙂